Chamberlains of chill ... from left, The Chainsmokers, Rihanna and Ed Sheeran.
Composite: Getty; David Levene for the Guardian

In the early 2010s, pop culture was at the peak of a maximalist high. People wore T-shirts and baseball hats emblazoned with neon “YOLO”s (You Only Live Once) and listened to hyper-climactic pop bangers and rap odes to “molly” (the millennial term for MDMA). There was Ludacris ft Usher and David Guetta’s Rest of My Life with its soaring notes and Nietzsche-via-Kanye lines about cheating death and getting stronger, LMFAO’s apocalyptic Party Rock Anthem and Miley Cyrus’s nihilistic We Can’t Stop, which doubled as celebration and cry for help.

In this new era, YOLO feels less like a rallying cry and more like a threat. Washington Post pop music critic Chris Richards argues that in “today’s freaked-out America”, pop stars, like the rest of us, turn to drugs like Xanax “to numb the agony of existence”. According to Richards, pop audiences like to hear a similarly numbing effect in music: “Comfort zones are hard to find in Donald Trump’s America … We used to want to have our minds blown. Now, we’d prefer to have our minds massaged.” Songwriters now aim to “mitigate intensity” rather than build it, and remain well within “comfort zones ... instead of forging new sounds or fresh styles”.

This shift had led artists such as Lana Del Rey, Kygo and the Weeknd to write songs that emphasise what Richards calls “a smoothness, a softness, a steadiness”. Contemporary pop audiences eschew the shock-and-awe of bro-step in favour of songs such as Shape of You, whose vaguely Caribbean groove cycles without much flux in energy or intensity, as if embodying singer Ed Sheeran’s trademark gentle white masculinity, which is romantic but not exactly sexual. Chill pop songs are a form of self-medication to take the edge off in a world in which it seems sexual predators are everywhere, Nazis feel empowered and millennials’ financial fortunes are suffering.

Chill also mimics the use of anti-anxiety medication to maintain productivity during anxiety-producing circumstances. When I searched for the term on Spotify, two of the top six playlist results were identified as music for studying (“Chill Lofi Study Beats” and “Chillhop Study Beats”). But chill has also become subtly toxic, a way of dis-identifying with attributes associated with femininity, like the enthusiasm of teenage girls, the most maligned sector of the pop music audience.

Contemporary pop treats getting hyped as just another kind of low-status, low-reward women’s work

UrbanDictionary.com defines “chill” as the “ability to act in a rational manner” such that one refrains from excess, and its examples of “no chill” highlight negative stereotypes about women, like being overly invested in a romantic partner (“When a girl bases her every choice on a single guy she likes”). As cultural critic Alana Massey argues: “Chill is a sinister refashioning of ‘Calm down!’ from an enraging and highly gendered command into an admirable attitude”, and Vice writer Alison Stevenson explains that “being a chill woman is the opposite of being a hysterical one”. Chill is the ability to reign in feminine and feminised excess.

This gendering of musical climaxes isn’t isolated to the critical reception of former boyband singers. In their 2016 hit Closer, the ur-chill Chainsmokers rely on a gendered division of labour that leaves all the work of building their admittedly mellowed-out climax to guest vocalist Halsey. From 3min 14sec to 3min 34sec, both Halsey and Chainsmoker Andrew Taggart repeat the line “we ain’t ever getting older”, but only Halsey’s vocals grow in force and intensity, climaxing in an almost drawled vibrato on the last syllable as it fades out into the instrumental post-chorus. Contemporary pop music treats getting hyped as just another kind of low-status, low-reward women’s work.

From Blurred Lines to New Rules: how sex in pop has changed for ever

Read more

Like its ancestor cool, chill does double duty as a prestige marker. On the one hand, in the post-#MeToo era, chill masculinity seems infinitely preferable to so-called “toxic masculinity”, which is predatory and self-destructive. But even though Sheeran’s tame romanticism may feel less toxic than the slightly skeevy masculinity of bro-step, chill is less a step towards equality and more an update on gender and race stereotypes.

Beyond a general swing away from early 2010s maximalism and transgressiveness, the kinds of music described as chill have no consistent musical identity that would reliably distinguish it from anything else (this is one thing that distinguishes chill from ambient, which is a genre with more or less consistently identifiable characteristics). For example, Spotify-curated playlists with chill in the title span all sorts of genres, from country to classical to R&B to 80s music: the last of which includes songs by Madonna, Ryuichi Sakamoto, U2, the Durutti Column, Miami Sound Machine and the Neville Brothers that have nothing sonically in common except that they are toned-down versions of these artists’ otherwise widely divergent styles. Here, chill is a kind of de-escalation.

But not everyone is equally rewarded for turning the energy level down. Female performers are often expected to exhibit excessive enthusiasm and do all the heavy lifting whenever songs show a bit of energy or ebullience. And audiences sometimes get upset when those performers don’t fulfil that expectation. Fellow academics Katherine McKittrick and Alexander Weheliye and I have all written about the negative responses Rihanna has received for her failure to perform girlish enthusiasm and resilience in her music, and audiences were outraged when she failed to transform her low points into spectacular successes, like Beyoncé did when she turned marital infidelity into the bombastic visual album Lemonade. Pop’s chill turn may have toned down the big dramatic gestures of the YOLO era, but it hasn’t done much to lessen its male dominance.

This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative. The links are powered by Skimlinks. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that Skimlinks cookies will be set. More information.